In Paradigm Shift 1: A Long Look Back

In Paradigm Shift 1: A Long Look Back
Only One World By Sylvia Mayuga (philstar.com) Updated October 11, 2009 08:45 AM

Tayabas Mountaineers swung on mountaineering ropes in breathtaking relay rescue of riverbank dwellers being swept in a river suddenly swelling. Honed by scaling majestic Banahaw in their backyard, the mountaineers rushed to sudden disaster led by their founding president Jun Redor, mental and moral muscle in full harness for Typhoon Rosing in 1995, the first “hundred-year rain” they’d ever known.

Redor is a scholarly son of old Tayabas, an artist, mythologist and deep ecologist who believes in and lives the unity of all things. As mountaineer he teaches one mind as the first condition to reaching peaks together in constant danger through steep passes, over yawning abyss, into virgin forest with ever new, not always pleasant surprises. The Tayabas Mountaineers love the sheer adventure in a friendship of rare quality. They share passion for Banahaw’s full reality, in life and death, with strangers who become lifelong allies.

In Rosing’s aftermath, geologist Raymundo Punongbayan fascinated us all. He was a treasured resource on the volcanic reality of the Philippine web of life in his lifetime, prodding imagination deep in the earth’s crust and deeper into its radioactive core. He surfaced in Banahaw with a warning. This mountain range belongs to one huge caldera with Taal and Makiling, volcanoes all, active or dormant, he said. A prospect of sudden major tectonic movement in this caldera, likely in its long quietude in a volatile region, could be Biblical devastation with upland deforestation. Could be worse than Rosing, he added.

Such impact can be visualized in a recorded 18th century eruption of Taal Volcano, lopping off an original peak originally visible all the way in Manila, creating that crater-lake with a tiny island in very deep turquoise waters viewed from the scenic volcanic lip of Tagaytay ridge. Tradition recalls a similar tectonic event creating the Banahaw crater-lake pouring havoc with water mightily pouring with great speed from heights to foothills with Typhoon Rosing, most tellingly in Sariaya. There’s hidden majesty to a slow motion story that began in our archipelago’s birth, continuing to this day.

LABB a.k.a. Luntiang Alyansa para sa Bundok Banahaw, our NGO, pleaded in all the foothill towns for everyone to protect this mountain range from a growing number of human predators. Beyond their threat to its abundant water for drink, irrigation and gravity-fed hydro-electricity was a barely written oral tradition in this hearth of first fire that kindled the Katipunan over a century later. Apolinario de la Cruz of Lucban lit that fire for the first time since Spanish colonization – the heretical notion that all men are born equal, indios included. His Cofradia de San Jose sprung from Manong Pule’s Burning Bush, wildfire spreading through the foothills, grazing Camarines Norte, south to all Katagalugan from the early to mid 19th century.

Rey Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution said the cofrades vanished from the lowlands after Pule’s capture in Banahaw de Tayabas and execution in the plaza of this seat of Spanish government in 1847. A Franciscan mission settlement turned cabecera, Tayabas gave its name to the original Quezon province stretching to the northernmost end of Luzon. The Cofradia re-converged in Banahaw’s elevations from all over, turning their backs on the colonizer's lowland church in new places of worship under the ancestral creator Bathala.

Around those caves, boulders, waterfalls, creeks, rivers and springs – erehiyas, shrines for erejes, heretics – was beauty in golden beetles, butterflies in delicate lilac or white with amusing red polka dots, rare stick insects as long as my forearm with carmine tail and a huge violet eye. Lovely aliens, these in hard won paradise trekking up vulcan de agua with disciplined young mountaineers, crowning years of travel camped in song with sunburned, laughing, musical company under full golden moon, waking to otherworldly dawn and ablution with mountain waters gurgling by.

In earlier travels through Katagalugan and neighboring provinces, signs on little wooden chapels always caught my eye. Banahaw gave them sharper slant– Cofradia descendants, kin to the Rizalistas. Westernized Filipino academics generally ignore them as anachronistic. Media skims them mechanically for shallow Holy Week stories then it’s back to invisibility for them.

They miss out. The best of this folk still live in lost intimacy with Nature in reverent tradition, waiting for the return of our revolutionary heroes in a Second Coming led by Mahal na Doktor José Rizál. If your formal education cannot grant that as a prophetic riddle of Filipino culture, look at the NPA. They’ve joined the ranks of illegal loggers in imported dialectical materialism cashing in on what forests remain, depriving the progeny of a nation they claim to liberate.

Typhoon Rosing had just confirmed our warning on Sariaya’s severely deforested slopes when new threat buzzed. Quezon governor Eddie Rodriguez was pushing a new proposal from Hopewell of the troublesome Pagbilao coal-powered plant, for northward extension of the Southern Luzon Expressway, SLEX, through Dolores and Sariaya. It seemed they were trying to pay smaller compensation for scenic foothill uplands declared a national park in the American period. Money over and under the table for capitol and governor in another urban-centric scheme was likely. The usual first question was only “how much.”

But a first sustainable development workshop nine days before Rosing brought Sariaya Mayor Juanito Manigbas to see this SLEX extension as a grave threat to life and livelihood in Banahaw looming over his town. Facing the unthinkable, Mayor Johnny woke his people to remember gawi, old eco-friendly customs – likas na agham, indigenous science, I told. They liked that. So they had science, too! Then news from Manila broke: The EIS bill mandating popular consent to such projects had been signed into law. Why, they could do their own EIS, whatever it was. A well-loved mayor set the ball rolling. We combed UPLB for environmental scientists to guide the first-ever people-researched Environmental Impact Study. No boundaries to the possible, not in emergency.

Progressives from old families and cults in upland Dolores met lowland Catholic ecologists in a team of seminarians with the diocesan spokesman, outspoken Fr. Raul Enriquez, a mestizo born in genteel lowland Sariaya. A first encounter allies in Banahaw de Dolores took him to trekking to its peak in their with very brown ranks. There said Mass with cult leaders under the eye of Bathala, Dios Ama at Inain Banahaw. We had a breakthrough.

And Kapit bisig was born in People Power á la Banal na Bundok : a chain of gallant mountaineers, Banahaw sect leaders, open-minded religious, proverb-spouting farmers, earnest lowland townsfolk and tradespeople, devoted scientists, determined artists and media culture bearers with NGO icon Dinky Soliman’s first-rate community organizers melting like super vitamins into organized ranks raring for action. EIS planning began in workshops at the beach, on to library, field research and fun climbs replete with Banahaw rituals. Teams trekked and camped with the folk in eloquent tongue, again with much laughter, always with lambanog refined to standards as old as Tayabas, nothing like those cheap versions sold on the highway. All it lacked was a direct line to central government in Manila.

Continued Next Week.